The Chicago Foreign Language Press Survey was published in 1942 by the Chicago Public Library Omnibus Project of the Works Progress Administration of Illinois. The purpose of the project was to translate and classify selected news articles that appeared in the foreign language press from 1855 to 1938. The project consists of 120,000 typewritten pages translated from newspapers of 22 different foreign language communities of Chicago.

Acknowledgments

This project was made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the
Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this
website do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the
Humanities.

This is a project of the Newberry Library. Douglas Knox served as project director through November 2011.

The Newberry Library's Scholl Center for American History and Culture provided a home
for the project, with support of the Dr. Scholl Foundation. Douglas Knox served as project director through November 2011. Staff of the Chicago Metro
History Education Center, particularly Lisa Oppenheim, were strong early advocates of
this project, as was Toby Higbie when he led the Scholl Center. Glenn Humphreys of the
Chicago Public Library and Alice Schreyer and Dan Meyer of the University of Chicago
Special Collections Research Center provided early encouragement. Jennifer Fry
contributed to planning during an internship.

The project depends on the work of technical partners who have been willing to
pay careful attention to unusual characteristics of the Press Survey. Bill Dwyer, Mike
Hightower, and Bina Trivedi of PanGeo Partners, Inc. understood what the project needed
in an initial XML transcription and worked hard and well to see it through. Sandor Weisz
and Joe Germuska of Methodtree, Inc., established a solid initial base for web
development. Matt Dorn and Eric Knudtson picked up the project
with enthusiasm and dedication, and came up with creative solutions to a number of
challenges.

The approach to markup makes relatively simple use of version P5 of the TEI Guidelines. This project benefited from the decades of experience of the TEI community in
thinking about representational issues and workflows in digital projects concerned with
the scholarly use of textual evidence. Julia Flanders and Syd Bauman of Brown University
taught an advanced workshop in text encoding that was well timed to help the project,
and Syd, Julia, and Laura Mandell helped especially to think through questions about how
to model the subject codes and other metadata. Ed Fishwick helped identify and correct
incomplete transcriptions with a careful eye. During a productive internship late in the
project Dan Tracy contributed a TEI transcription of the original code book instructing
the editors in the selection of material.